Free Time's Echo by Pamela Hartshorne Page B

right. I should be there, I thought wistfully. I should be dancing in bars until the small hours, then nursing a hangover in the shade with my friend, not teetering on the edges of time
in this old, cold northern city. I clicked on the link Mel had sent and found myself looking at a screen full of beautiful white sand beaches, complete with the obligatory leaning palm tree.
    I’d been to beaches since Khao Lak. I’d got over the fear that the sea would rise up again. There was a tiny moment when I first saw the photos when my throat closed in panic, but it
only lasted a second or two, and then I was fine again.
    I tried to concentrate on the images, but I kept looking up. The air had grown padded. It settled around me like a sigh, squeezing the energy out of me with every breath I took, while the
silence thickened, broken only by the putter of the gas fire, the muffled click of the mouse.
    I was about to close the page when I saw it, and the breath stopped in my lungs. A beach like all the others, but this one showed a child. Barely more than a speck on the screen, he was digging
alone on a beach.
    It wasn’t Lucas. I knew that, but my heart was beating high and hard. I swallowed, blinked and looked again.
    The child had gone. It was just a photo of a pristine beach fringed with palms.
    My palms were damp. I rubbed them on my jeans. I had seen it – I knew I had. Not Lucas, no, but there had been a child in one of the pictures. I was sure of it.
    Methodically I went through every single photo, but none of them showed a small boy with a spade.
    So I’d imagined it.
    I squeezed my eyes shut, wanting to squeeze the image from my mind, but I couldn’t. Lucas was there, so clear that I could see every bump in his knobbly spine, every one of the fine, fair
hairs at the nape of his neck. When I think of him, I think of his back, because that was mostly what I saw. Lucas didn’t like to make eye contact.
    He never played with the other children on the beach. He didn’t play at all. He spent Christmas Day digging a complex network of channels in the sand, and I was fascinated by his
single-minded approach. When the channel he had planned cut across the bit of beach where Matt and I were lying, his parents tried to call him away. That’s how I knew he was called Lucas.
They were Swedish and lifted their hands in helpless apology when he simply ignored them.
    ‘It’s okay,’ I said, digging Matt in the ribs. ‘We’ll move.’
    Lucas didn’t say thank you. His face was set and he carried on digging. Matt sighed and grumbled, but I picked up the spare spade and set it in the sand.
    ‘Here?’ I said to Lucas.
    He did look then – one quick, fierce look – then he nodded. We dug for hours, side by side, Lucas directing occasionally with a pointing finger. We didn’t say another word to
each other.
    Just that once, that’s all it was, but whenever I thought about that afternoon, my chest grew so tight that I could hardly breathe. I sat in Lucy’s sitting room and I kept my eyes
closed so that I wouldn’t have to look at the photos of all those beaches where Lucas wasn’t digging any more.
    ‘Hawise!’ My eyes snap open as my mistress bustles out into the yard and catches me with my face turned up to the sun, the tablecloth clutched to my chest.
‘What is the
matter
with you today?’ She looks at me narrowly. ‘You’ve been like a great gawby gawping at the moon all day!’
    ‘I was just thinking what a beautiful day it is,’ I say, hastily shaking the crumbs from the cloth. I don’t understand the sadness that welled up inside me when I closed my
eyes. It
is
a beautiful day, and I should be excited, not sad.
    For today I am going to meet Francis Bewley in my father’s orchard.
    He insisted on walking me back to the house after I’d made my purchases that day in the market, even though Hap went for his boot the moment I put him down. I thought I saw a flash of
something ugly in Francis’s face as